Translation of Transylvanian Culture-Specific Items into English

The present paper focuses on some difficulties encountered during the translation of culture-specific items in Zsuzsa Tapodi’s articles Links between the East and the West: Historical Bonds between the Hungarians and the Balkan Peoples and Hungarian Ethnographic Region in Romania, published in the May 2014 issue of Carmina Balcanica. As far as the theoretical framework adopted in this study is concerned, the terminology on translation strategies relies on the taxonomy developed by Aixelá (1996), while the classification of culture-specific items has been influenced by Dimitriu (2002) and Yılmaz-Gümüş (2012). The study provides a definition of the term ‘culture-specific item’, considers the targetreaders’ awareness of source-language culture, and presents a number of translation strategies applied to mediate culture-bound information between the source and target cultures.